Linux NewsThe Xen Project is Serious About Safety, So It Formed a Committee
Founding members AMD, EPAM, and Renesas already put in the groundwork, and there's a new Premier Plus membership tier to go with it.
Linux 7.3 Adds New "bpf_sock_read_xattr" Feature For systemd, BPF Programs
Merged earlier this year for Linux 7.1 was extended attributes on sockets support as a feature sought after by the likes of GNOME and systemd for helping with Varlink IPC usage and other purposes. A limitation though of the functionality has been no efficient means for a BPF program to read those user extended attribute labels back. But with Linux 7.3 that's being addressed with the new bpf_sock_read_xattr() kernel function...
[$] Fedora prepares for the end of AF_ALG
The Linux kernel's user-space interface (AF_ALG) to the Crypto API has been linked to a number of recent high-profile security problems, including Copy Fail and successor vulnerabilities. It was deprecated earlier this year. Eric Biggers, and other kernel developers, have been working to remove it from the kernel. With that in mind, the Fedora Project is planning to restrict use of AF_ALG in the next Fedora release in the hopes of nudging remaining users of the API to prepare for its eventual removal.
Firefox 154 released with translation, AI feature and UI tweaks
Mozilla has released Firefox 154 with some small AI-related changes, an ‘improved’ full-page translations and up to 10x faster video seeking – only on macOS, that one. This also serves as the final monthly release of Firefox. The browser switches to a faster, twice-monthly release schedule early September. You’ll be back here, reading “Firefox 155 released” in two weeks, rather than the usual four weeks. Enough of then; what’s new now? Firefox’s been expanding its range of address bar actions in recent releases. We got tab muting action in v152 and an colour picker in v153. Firefox 154 adds a […]
IOmap Improvement For Linux 7.3 Takes EXT4 & XFS Performance Further
As part of the VFS pull requests now merged to the Linux 7.3 development kernel was an improvement to the IOmap framework used by various file-systems for mapping logical file byte offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage. With the now-merged code, this modern block mapping framework is allowing better performance at least for the EXT4 file-system...
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, 389-ds:1.4, bind, haproxy, kernel, kernel-rt, libXfont2, nghttp2, and unbound), Debian (calibre, expat, ironic, and linux-6.12), Fedora (coturn, linux-firmware, php-phpseclib, and sqlite), Red Hat (fence-agents, osbuild-composer, pam, resource-agents, and sg3_utils), SUSE (ffmpeg, jetty-minimal, open-iscsi, python, python313-h2, python313-pysaml2, redis, redis7, rsync, sccache, texlive, and wasm-bindgen), and Ubuntu (engrampa, linux-aws-7.0, and linux-azure-fde-5.15).
I Found an Easy Way to Make GNOME More Colorful
Rewaita makes it easy to recolor GTK and Libadwaita apps with popular palettes, custom colors and a few extra visual effects.
Framework Laptop 12 Updated For Intel Wildcat Lake, Shipping Starts In October
Last year Framework Computer launched the Framework Laptop 12 as an upgrade-friendly and Linux-compatible 2-in-1 laptop. The Framework Laptop 12 was originally powered by Intel Core 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" low-end processor while now Framework is adding Core Series 3 "Wildcat Lake" as an upgrade or for new Laptop 12 orders...
Still using Linux Mint? Here are the 6 Ubuntu features you're missing out on
Some features are easy to miss when everything already works!
The CachyOS Performance vs. Other Linux Operating Systems On A $46k USD Workstation
Recently I looked at the performance of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS vs. Windows 11 on the Intel Xeon 678X running within the HP Z4 G6i workstation. Linux performed admirably as one would expect. With this Intel Xeon Granite Rapids WS workstation from HP though commanding a retail price more than $46,000 USD, you likely want nothing but the utmost performance out of it. So for those looking to maximize the OS performance, here are some numbers from the HP Z4 G6i workstation when running not only Ubuntu 26.04 LTS but also Fedora Workstation 44, AlmaLinux, and the performance-optimized CachyOS.
Orion Browser for Linux Officially Enters Beta
Orion Browser has officially moved its Linux version into beta, with Flatpak builds now available for both x86_64 and ARM64 systems.
Rust For Linux 7.3 Begins Seeing Fixes To Prepare For Rust's GCC Backend
In addition to the POWER/PowerPC code adding Rust kernel support, the main set of Rust programming language updates for the Linux 7.3 kernel have now been submitted. Most notable are early fixes toward eventually allowing the experimental Rust GCC back-end to be used as an alternative to the official rustc compiler with LLVM code generation...
Linux 7.3 Corrects Faulty Behavior Of FAT File-System Driver For Filenames Too Fat
It's not too often that the Linux FAT driver for FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 format support receives updates worth mentioning. For Linux 7.3 there is one patch though and it's due to the driver until now lacking an upper-bounds check on the length of the filename, which could lead to some unexpected situations with extremely long filenames...
Fedora x86-64-v3 Optimized Packages Pushed Back To At Least Fedora 46
There was a proposal under discussion the past few months on building x86-64-v3 packages for Fedora 45 while retaining x86-64-v1 packages. The hope was building the Fedora packages with x86-64-v3 where AVX/AVX2, FMA, BMI2, and other newer ISA features can be assumed in the name of better performance. Unfortunately, the x86-64-v3 plans are now delayed but may be reconsidered next year with Fedora 46...
Lenovo Lands New Watchdog Driver In Linux 7.3 For Their SE30G2 + SE60 Edge AI Computers
When it comes to the watchdog driver changes for Linux 7.3, standing out is the new Lenovo driver for their upcoming ThinkEdge AI edge computing systems...